Beirut Camps Tragedy : Palestinian Story: Ruins to Cling To

Ahmed Kuborsli, a 30-year-old Palestinian, figured he was standing on the very spot where his home had once been. A child’s tiny pink shoes protruded from the rubble.

“This is nothing compared with what happened inside the camp,” Kuborsli said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the smoking remains of the Chatilla refugee camp.

“In there,” he said, lowering his eyes, “there are many dead and wounded. It is horrible.”

Largely forgotten in the avalanche of attention accorded the holding of American hostages in Beirut, the three Palestinian refugee camps in the city’s southern suburbs--within view of the airport--have been turned into ruins by five weeks of fighting between Palestinian guerrillas and the Shia Muslim Amal militia.

Except for an occasional skirmish around the outer edges of the Chatilla, Sabra and Borj el Brajne camps, the fighting was halted June 15 by a Syrian-brokered cease-fire.

Still, the cease-fire, which brought tan-uniformed Lebanese policemen into the camps, has done little to relieve the suffering of the thousands who once took shelter there.

“How can I live in such ruins?” asked Mohammed Saleh Hassan, who arrived at Chatilla in 1948.

The grocery store he ran and the house behind it look as if they have been stepped on. Household appliances hang precariously from windows. A concrete wall looks as if the gentle Mediterranean breeze might knock it flat.

“Even during the Israeli air raids, this didn’t happen to us,” Hassan’s wife, Khair, said.

‘What Can I Do?’

“I have 10 children; what can I do?” Hassan asked, as neighbors, curious, gathered as he talked with a group of foreigners. “Who will help me rebuild?”

Until a few weeks ago, the street in front of Hassan’s shop was one of the busiest in Beirut, a bustling thoroughfare of pushcarts and pedestrians that stretched between the Sabra and Chatilla camps.

Just down the road was the vegetable market, a disorderly but vibrant center of commerce where peddlers shouted prices from under striped umbrellas and children hawked packages of chewing gum.

Although they are still called camps, because the residents are officially refugees even though they arrived in 1948, Sabra and Chatilla had taken on the appearance of cities, with apartment blocks and shops made of cinder blocks and corrugated iron.

Now, most of Sabra and Chatilla have been destroyed. Hardly a building is unscathed in either camp, showing the ferocity of the fighting and the use of tanks and mortars by Amal and its allies in the Lebanese army’s 6th Brigade.

The Shia fighters attacked the camps as part of their drive to prevent the Palestinian guerrillas, ousted by Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, from re-establishing a foothold in the country.

According to official statistics, 650 people were killed in the fighting for the camps, 2,500 wounded and thousands left homeless. The scale of destruction is staggering even by Lebanese standards.

The market has been reduced to rubble. The corrugated iron roofs that once provided shade for shoppers lie crumpled like discarded candy wrappers.

Although the fighting has been over for two weeks, few people venture out. The other day two young boys were struggling under the weight of a box full of video cassettes rescued from a collapsed video rental store.

“We saved the Indian films,” one of the two announced triumphantly.

Along the street, a man and his two sons were tugging at the remains of a car’s engine. The car had been hit with machine-gun fire and shrapnel.

Every few hundred yards a single store was open, oddly spared the violence. Residents desperate for water had punctured pipes, and many of the streets were flooded.

The floor of the Chatilla mosque was broken into a thousand pieces of concrete; flowers peeked up from the rubble. The mosque has been turned into a makeshift graveyard for 45 bodies, stacked four deep.

“The smell was just getting too bad,” a doctor said.

Someone has nailed up a piece of cardboard with a handwritten scrawl in blue paint: “He who dies without his land is a martyr; he who dies without his home is a martyr; he who dies without his money is also a martyr, as the Prophet Mohammed said.”

Abu Adnan, a Palestinian guerrilla leader who is now the head of the camp committee, said he did not want to open newly healed wounds by discussing the “war of the camps.” But he added softly: “A week of peace cannot eliminate fear from one night to the next.”

A Palestinian doctor said he feared being “skinned alive” by Amal for talking with reporters about the battle that raged around the camps.

“It was a dirty war,” the doctor said. “There was no water, no shelter, no medication. It was a merciless, dirty war.”

Yet the same doctor said he saw a glimmer of hope in the tenacity of the camp’s residents. “The people who can’t afford to rebuild say they will live in a tent if necessary,” he said.

Display of Unity

Mohammed Shaker, a former aide to Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was in Chatilla when the fighting erupted. He said the Palestinians have since rallied in a rare display of unity. Families are crowding together in the few remaining structures and are determined to stay on, he said.

“What’s important is the will of the people, because we know it’s our future at stake,” Shaker said.

The situation at Borj el Brajne seems less drastic than at Sabra and Chatilla; Amal never was able to penetrate Borj el Brajne. Many buildings survived, though there is considerable damage along the perimeter.

When a U.N. food supply truck arrived with hundreds of sacks of Swiss wheat for the camps, people came out of their homes to watch as it was unloaded.

“Most of the people had nothing to eat for five weeks,” Hussein, a Palestinian travel agent who was trapped by the fighting, told a reporter.

‘No Food or Water’

“We had no food or water, and the children were very hungry,” said Aisha Milhelm, a woman with five children. “We made soup from flour and sugar and water and served it to the children to keep them quiet.”

Borj el Brajne is also the home of several hundred Palestinian guerrillas who repulsed the Amal fighters. As part of the cease-fire, the Palestinians were allowed to keep their light weapons--all they had, really--and the former divisions within the Palestinian groups appear to have been replaced by hostility for Amal.

“Everyone is now together,” Issam, a tattooed guerrilla, said at the office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. “We are not all for Arafat, but we are together against Berri”--Nabih Berri, the leader of Amal.

There were card tables displaying fragments of shells fired into the camps. Alongside were displays of makeshift Palestinian weapons: a slingshot made out of pair of springs, a mortar fashioned from iron pipe.

A sheet covered in Arabic writing was stretched across a narrow street. The face of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader who is revered by many Amal fighters, glared down from the sheet at the ruined street.

“We are Palestinian, but we are Muslims,” the Arabic words said. “If you belong to Khomeini, you must not kill us, because we are Muslims, too.”